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BAYARD, HIPPOLYTE (1801–1887)
French photographer
Hippolyte Bayard, one of the pioneers of early French
photography, discovered a process for making direct
positive photographs on paper in 1839. Although his
invention was eclipsed by the brilliant success of fellow
Frenchman Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, Bayard
nevertheless deserves greater recognition for his role
as an independent inventor of photography than he has
generally been accorded.
Bayard was born on 20 January, 1801 in Breteuil
sur Noye, a small down located in the department of
the Oise. The son of a justice of the peace, Bayard
worked as a clerk in a notary offi ce before moving to
Paris where he obtained a position as a civil servant
in the ministry of Finance. According to an early bi-
ographer, Bayard’s father, who was an avid gardener,
experimented with the chemical actions of sunlight on
the skin of ripening fruit. Cutting out letters or numbers
from a dark piece of paper and wrapping it around a
peach as it ripened on the tree, Bayard senior effec-
tively created a “signed” piece of fruit, for the skin of
the peach remained light where it had been masked by
the paper and darkened in the areas that had received
exposure to sunlight.
Whether or not Hippolyte Bayard’s interest in
photography can be traced back to his father’s experi-
ments with photographic writing on peaches, it is clear
that he became interested in the chemical actions of
light sometime in the 1830s. Although he worked as
a government functionary, Bayard’s social sphere in
Paris included painters, printmakers, stage designers,
writers, and actors, many of whom he met through
his childhood friend Edmond Geffroy, an actor at the
Comédie Française. Through Geffroy, Bayard met the
painter Amaury-Duval and seems to have frequented
his studio in the 1830s. In this milieu of intellectual
discourse and artistic experimentation, Bayard would
likely been aware of attempts by Niepce, Daguerre and
others to fi x the image produced by a camera obscura
by means of chemical manipulation.
The offi cial announcement on 7 January, 1839 by
scientist and politician François Arago of Daguerre’s
discovery of a method for capturing the image from a
camera obscura seems to have spurred Bayard into ac-
tion. By 20 January of that year, Bayard had begun ex-
perimenting with the light-sensitive properties of silver
chloride. By 5 February, two weeks after William Henry
Fox Talbot showed his “photogenic drawings” to the
Royal Institute, Bayard invited the physicist and member
of the French Academy of Sciences César Despretz to
view his fi rst photographs. These appear to have been
similar to Talbot’s “photogenic drawings,” that is, nega-
tive images made by soaking paper in silver chloride,
covering one side with a layer of silver nitrate, placing
an object on the paper and exposing it to light.
Seemingly unaware of the value of a negative im-
age that could yield positive prints, Bayard continued
to search for a way to produce direct positive images.
His progress was rapid, for, according to according to
a notebook preserved at the Société Française de Pho-
tographie, on 20 March, 1839 he showed to friends his
fi rst direct positives on paper.
In February 1840, Bayard described his process for
making a direct positive on paper. A sheet of paper was
“salted” writing paper by soaking it in a solution of so-
dium chloride. After the paper dried, it was sensitized by
fl oating it in a silver nitrate bath to create light-sensitive
silver chloride. The paper was then exposed to light until
it turned black (due to the action of light which converts
the silver chloride into silver metal), washed, dried, and
kept in a portfolio until use. Immediately before use,
the paper was soaked in an potassium iodide solution,
placed in the camera, and exposed to light. The areas of
the paper that received light were bleached in proportion
to the intensity of light exposure, while areas that did not
receive light remained dark. The paper was then fi xed in
sodium thiosulfate and washed in water and ammonia..
The resulting image was a unique, laterally reversed,
positive photograph. The slight orange tint typical of
many of Bayard’s direct positives on paper is the result
of his use of potassium iodide.
Bayard continued to improve his process and by the
end of May had shortened the exposure time from one
hour to approximately fi fteen minutes, depending on
light conditions. On May 20, he showed his direct posi-
tive prints to Arago, Daguerre’s champion. According
to Bayard, Arago convinced Bayard not to reveal his
discovery immediately. Bayard, who later concluded
that Arago’s advice was designed to stall him until
Daguerre’s experiments were published, would come
to feel that his rightful place as inventor of photography
had been usurped.
Whatever the truth of this claim, Bayard did in fact
exhibit direct positive prints on paper in July 1839,
several weeks before the public unveiling of Daguerre’s
process at the French Academy of Sciences. The oc-
casion was an exhibition of art benefi ting the victims
of a recent earthquake in Martinique. The fi rst known
public exhibition of photography, Bayard’s direct posi-
tive prints (among them a number of still lifes) roused
great interest and were praised for their artistic merit
by several major Parisian newspapers, including Le
Moniteur universel and Le Constitutionnel. The latter
enthused over Bayard’s photographs, writing that “we
are not competent to discuss the intrinsic merits of Mr.
Bayard’s process, nor compare it to that of Daguerre. But
the results obtained by Mr. Bayard are of an exquisite
fi neness, a harmonious softness of light that painting